While aesthetically there aren't any major changes with the Facebook 5.0 iOS app there are improvements that make the app faster than before. According to Facebook, the app was "rebuilt from the ground up," and is supposed to be twice as fast as the past version. Overall the app features smoother and faster scrolling and photos load "instantly" thanks to changes from switching from HTML5 to iOS native programming. I've complained about the iOS Facebook app being slow on our podcasts in the past, at least on a first impression, it appears there is less to complain about with this version at least in terms of speed.

Microsoft has today announced the beta of a new free e-mail service called Outlook.com. The design of the interface takes design features from the Windows 8 Mail app and Outlook 2013. This new interface is to be a fresh and clean functioning design that will also be touch-friendly and adhere to privacy concerns as well as be accessible from any device.

Anonymity just became even scarcer, at least with YouTube. YouTube is now recommending that you switch to your full name when posting videos and comments. They will pull your real name from your Google+ account in fact. Google+ has not been a big fan of anonymity and prefers to keep online comments free of pseudonyms to try to mitigate things like sexism, racism and other issues. Now via a pop-up dialogue box YouTube will urge users to use their real names.

In what could be viewed as an odd move, Autodesk, known for CAD software has agreed to buy Socialcam. The deal is worth about $60 million according to both companies. The deal is expected to close within 30 days.

We can now officially add Yahoo to the list of companies compromised due to hackers. Yahoo has confirmed that the usernames and passwords of more than 400,000 Yahoo Voices accounts were stolen from their servers earlier this week and that data was posted online. Indications were the information has since been removed, but a direct link to the original source seems to still exist and is accessible whenever the load is low enough. The breach wasn't just credentials for Yahoo, but also Gmail, AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, MSN, SBC Global, BellSouth, Verizon and Live.com as well.

As of around 12:45 p.m. Eastern Time, Twitter has been down now for some time. You could hear the productivity of people increasing as a result. A Twitter spokesperson at the time had said they were looking into the issue and didn't give any word on when the service would return. By 1:10 p.m. they got their services back online and thus the productivity has gone back down around the world.

Pingdom stats revealed this was one of Twitter's worst crashes in months. The outage lasted around 59 minutes.

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